Archive for July, 2014

I flew with Thomsons today for the first time. I fly a lot in my job, mostly short flights to other European cities, as a result I get to see lots of safety videos and safety demonstrations. Normally I doze off through these, I certainly don’t give them my full attention. Today’s video was different. I listened all the way through to everything that was said. The reason…. They had children playing the part of the stewardesses. The message was exactly the same but it was delivered differently, and that made it interesting. There is an excellent lesson to us all. If you want to deliver a message and you want to make it stand out, deliver it differently.

Have you seen any other examples of where a standard message has been delivered in a different way to make it stand out. Maybe you have done this in your line of work.

When you are making a decision about whether to work with a marketing company you want to be sure that they can do what they say they can do. Often the evidence for that can be seen in how they operate and how they present themselves.

I have been forwarded the same email twice this week. The email was addressed to our HR Manager and also to our quality Manager. In that email the company were offering to get us cheap advertising on the Daily Mail website.

I visited this company’s web site and it looks impressive. Some people may be suckered in. They have a section on their site called “Contextual targetng” In this section they say –

“Contextual targeting is a form of advertising whereby adverts are ‘in context’ with the editorial environment”

Now, I would suggest that if this company had done their research they would know that an ad for our products would not be in the right context if it was placed on the Daily Mail Website. We are a B2B company and we target our products at a narrow group of engineering companies.

The other major fail is that they sent these emails to the wrong people. None of my colleagues in marketing, or me as the Marketing Manager have received an email. Do they really think an HR Manager or a Quality Manager will make decisions on ad placements or are they just playing the numbers game and hoping that eventually they will get to a decision maker.